As the new semester begins, excited students help awaken the dormitories from their summer slumber. Talks of new classes, incomprehensible professors, and off-campus parties can be heard emanating from dorm rooms and common areas alike. However, some of those complaints may not be heard coming from a dorm on Stony Brook’s campus, but rather, one on Dowling College’s campus.

This year, according to Newsday, around 200 incoming freshman will dorm at a Dowling College dormitory, due to the university accepting more students than it can find rooming for on campus. Stephanie Rogers, a biology major transferring in from Hunter College, informed the Stony Brook Independent that she was not notified of her housing placement at Dowling College until late July, which would make transferring to another school almost impossible given the time constraints.

This is an incredibly underhanded tactic by the administration at Stony Brook University. It is as if you have been waiting on line for what you hope will be an amazing roller coaster for 18 years, then you finally get on and sit down, only to be told that the seat belt on your seat has a tendency to malfunction, but the ride has already started and there is no going back, so have fun.

Now, I do not think you need to win a Fields Medal to understand that when some kind of organization spends more than it has, then they go into debt. In other words, they do both have the proper resources to fully meet all of their demands. So, too, can this analogy be applied to housing. If you do not have enough dorms to accommodate all of your students, then make a cut-off number. Limit the number of students you accept. If the university was reaching its housing limit, then stop accepting so many students. I cannot imagine every person in the Admissions department, along with other people in the University, missed this clerical error.

Thankfully, though, these students will be getting a discount for commuting all the way from Shirley. That discount? A whopping $250 (roughly). That is about what it costs to buy three orders of sushi from Jasmine, or a burger with fries from the SAC.

The only upside to this whole debacle is that, according to the Independent, the dorms over at Dowling happen to have air conditioning and kitchens. But even then, I am not sure if you could pay me enough to ride a bus from Shirley every day, especially when I thought I would actually be living on campus.

If I was dorming on Dowling College’s campus, paying almost the same money it takes to dorm on Stony Brook’s campus, I would be livid. The university needs to do more than give a cheap discount to those living at Dowling College. And, going forth, I think it would be wise for Stony Brook University to consider their students, rather than their wallets, as their number one concern.